Substation surveillance using RFI and complementary EMI detection techniques

The successful implementation of a substation asset management strategy depends heavily on predictive maintenance assessments with surveillance based techniques used to identify potential sites of degradation followed by more investigative and invasive quantitative techniques. The deployment of radio frequency interference (RFI) measurement can provide an efficient non-invasive surveillance technique to detect and locate partial discharges (PD) to individual high-voltage (HV) apparatus. This paper demonstrates the benefits of combining the assessment of RFI emissions with targeted deployment of other complementary non-invasive electromagnetic interference (EMI) detection techniques.